Professor Brian Horgan, a turf grass specialist. Photo by Mark Luinenburg

When Pat Duncanson, a 1983 graduate in agricultural business at the University, spread nitrogen fertilizer on his cornfields outside Mapleton, Minnesota, this summer he was not only looking to increase the productivity of his cornfields. He was also adding to the store of our collective knowledge about the best balance between crop production, profit, and environmental impact. Specifically, Duncanson was a participant in a test to measure the effect of applying different rates of fertilizer on different plots in his fields and the amount of corn those plots would yield at harvest time.

For the past two years, Duncanson has been part of a growers’ group called the South Central Minnesota Ag Innovators. Its members, representing nine farming operations, meet several times a year to share information, listen to presentations by experts, discuss technology, and devise ways to test methods of "precision agriculture," a kind of cultivation that combines modern farming techniques with high-tech tools of measurement, like yield monitors and global positioning systems.

That equipment allows farmers like Duncanson to create grid maps of their fields that record precise measurements of "input"—fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides—and their impact on "outputs"—how many bushels produced per section of their fields. In analyzing these measurements, the growers’ group works closely with Chris Iremonger, an outreach coordinator for the University of Minnesota’s Precision Agriculture Center who set up the South Central Ag Innovators group.

"[Iremonger] processes a lot of data we generate—usually in the form of yield maps—that we have don’t have the training or the software to process ourselves," Duncanson says. "That allows us to do research and conduct trials like we’ve never been able to do before." Many such trials, he points out, were first conducted on smaller plots at University Research and Outreach Centers, then transferred by growers’ groups to their own larger plots of land.

"Ultimately," Iremonger says, "precision ag is designed to lower inputs. That’s what these groups talk about: stewardship. Farmers don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘What can I do today to screw up the environment?’ But they are working in a tough market. Precision agriculture allows them to reduce their risks by showing them they can lower the use of, say, nitrogen- and phosphorus-based fertilizers without having a negative impact on their yields."

And at a time when it’s becoming increasingly clear that "nutrient" runoff from fertilizers is implicated in sometimes devastating environmental problems, like the area of oxygen-starved water in the Gulf of Mexico that has appeared just below the mouth of the Mississippi (commonly referred to as the Dead Zone), whatever encourages farmers and others to reduce their use of fertilizers is good for all of us.

Outreach from the laboratory to cropland, field-tested research into better ways to manage farming, hard data on agriculture’s environmental impact: These are among the reasons that in 1995 the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences (COAFES) established one of the nation’s first precision ag centers. Over the past seven years, the center has grown into a venture engaging the work of some 40 faculty and researchers from various disciplines.

Meanwhile, the Precision Agriculture Center symbolizes the dramatic changes that have altered, and continue to alter, food production and processing—changes that, in turn, have also dramatically altered COAFES’s role as the state’s land-grant agricultural college founded specifically to train farmers, provide them with research and technical assistance, and create new varieties of crops adapted to Minnesota’s climate and soil condition. Today, growers are only one of the many rural and urban constituencies served by the college’s 12 departments and six research and outreach stations.

Consider some of the following facts: While enrollment in the college is up almost 90 percent, most new students are from metropolitan areas, not farms. In fact, only 26 current undergraduates live on farms. The majority of undergraduates are female, and some of the most popular majors are agricultural economics, nutrition, and food safety; in the past three years, no COAFES graduate has gone into farming. Although corn and soybeans continue to dominate Minnesota’s ag production, it’s been 40 years since the U has produced a new corn variety. And flowers and turf management and production are now more profitable enterprises in the state than growing soybeans.

Over the postwar decades, all this resulted in a college continually in the process of reinvention. In fact, when Charles Muscoplat was appointed vice president for agricultural policy and dean of COAFES late in 1999, he recalls finding "a college that had transformed itself but didn’t recognize it." This "ad hoc" transformation, he says, "wasn’t packaged well, wasn’t validated by inquiry or by consulting with Minnesota citizens."

To rectify that situation, Muscoplat decided to back faculty calls for a formal COAFES "priority process" designed to identify priorities that would govern decisions about how the college might best meet the changing needs of the 21st century.

In structuring the priority process, COAFES opted for an exhaustive and participatory, rather than top-down, approach. Over the summer months and on into the fall of 2000, more than 100 college faculty members worked on drafting six priority themes that were then refined through debate and discussion at several all-faculty meetings. In November, staff and students were given the opportunity to voice their views. And in December, the college took the refined and revised priorities on the road, holding "listening sessions" at eight locations around the state, a step that, Muscoplat admits, was not without some risk.

"We were a bit nervous [about the listening sessions]," he recalls. "There were environmentalists who came in and said, ‘You’re not doing enough.’ And livestock people saying, ‘We don’t like the way the state’s making it harder for us to get our permits.’ Sometimes they were all sitting at the same table."

But in floating from table to table during the listening session, Muscoplat discovered two things. First, despite widely divergent views—ranging from those who insisted that the college should teach only organic methods of farming and food processing, to those who feel it should concentrate solely on helping the state’s dwindling number of family farms, to those who think the college should focus exclusively on flower production—the participants were quite respectful toward each other.

He also found that, once participants learned the extent and variety of the college’s current outreach, teaching, and research undertakings, "They were amazed by what we were doing," says Muscoplat. "But then, having come to the college directly from the private sector, I was amazed by it too." By a natural progression, he says, the listening sessions evolved into learning sessions for all parties involved.

Last October, to an energetically positive response from faculty, students, farmers, trade associations, politicians, and industry representatives alike, the college announced the results of this multipart process: five broad college priorities and one overarching priority—Emphasizing Exemplary Education—all governed by a newly refined mission: "Knowledge for a Changing World."

The other priorities identified by the process are Promoting Safe and Healthy Foods, Enhancing Agricultural Systems, Revitalizing Minnesota’s Rural Communities, Serving Urban Communities, and Improving Environmental Quality. From now on, the priorities will be used to guide all the college’s decisions on faculty positions, curriculum, learning opportunities, and research and outreach.

A moment’s reflection makes it clear that all the priorities are profoundly interwoven. Safe and healthy food cannot be produced without, for example, enhancing agricultural systems, which includes livestock management, transportation systems, and methods of storage and processing. Enhancing agricultural systems can’t help but aid in the revitalization of Minnesota’s rural communities. And neither urban nor rural communities will be served without improving environmental quality. And so on.

"I am," says Muscoplat, "a zealot for agriculture—but agriculture defined as broadly as possible."

For examples of agriculture "broadly defined," you need look no further than programs planned or already under way under the Improving Environmental Quality priority, such as COAFES’s ramped-up initiatives in turf research, development, and management.

This summer, on the site of what had been a cattle pasture on the St. Paul campus, the college broke ground for a 16-acre outdoor Turf Research, Outreach, and Education Center (TROE). When completed, the new turf facility will include sample plots simulating grass-growing conditions on residential lawns, athletic fields, and golf courses. Just as important, it will serve as an outdoor, hands-on lab for students attracted to the turf program by the burgeoning career opportunities in turf production and management.

In a sign of the college’s strong stakeholder relationships, the research center is being funded in part with money from the Minnesota Turf and Grounds Foundation, an umbrella organization of associations representing sod growers,

Professor David Mulla, an expert in nutrient cycling. Photo by Mark Luinenburg

seed producers, nurseries, managers of sports fields, golf course superintendents, and others. TROE is also benefiting from in-kind contributions from industry, with turf equipment manufacturers and suppliers like Minnesota-based Toro donating equipment or leasing at reduced rates and other companies helping out with construction of storage facilities, plots, and irrigation systems.

While farm and livestock operations have shouldered much of the blame for releasing nitrogen and phosphorus into the air and water, runoff from lawns and turf is now recognized as a major source of nutrient cycling. Besides developing new and hardier varieties of grass suitable for Minnesota’s harsh climate and short growing season, the new facility will be used to explore ways to manage turf using reduced quantities of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

"Researchers at the facility will expand work we’re already engaged in looking at the fate of nitrogen and other nutrients on turf," says Phil Larsen, an associate dean with a background in turf research. "How fast does it leach into the groundwater? What’s the least amount you can put on and still get the desired outcome? At the same time, we’ll continue developing drought- and disease-resistant varieties that can help hold down dust, prevent erosion, and keep surface temperatures cooler, with all the ramifications of that for the environment."

The first plot constructed at the facility is a 50,000-square-foot putting green, built entirely with $200,000 cash and thousands of dollars worth of in-kind donations from the turf industry. The green will not only allow study of grass varieties and nutrient runoff and leaching, a 3,000-square-foot portion of it contains a state-of-the-art irrigation system that, for the first time, will enable researchers to study water itself as a variable in turf treatment.

"I see one of the biggest environmental concerns of the future as not nutrient and pesticide cycling, but water—its quantity and quality," predicts Brian Horgan, a professor and turf grass extension specialist hired last year as part of COAFES’s expanding commitment to turf. "Typically we have not been able to study water as a variable in turf research, but this area—and others we’ll be constructing in the future—will allow us to study the effect of applying different amounts of water to different kinds of turf."

In the past year, one of Horgan’s main jobs has been to build even stronger ties with the turf industry, the better to find out precisely what turf growers and managers need from the University. He has regularly attended meetings of the Minnesota Golf Course Supervisors Association and other groups and sits on the board of the Minnesota Turf and Grounds Foundation. During that time, he says, the environment is an issue that has popped up time and time again.

"Turf grass managers around the state want to know if their practices are creating problems. Are they sound? Are they being good stewards of the land?" Horgan says. "I can give them information gleaned from elsewhere in the country, but they want information from research done in Minnesota, relevant to our soils, climate, and way of managing turf." The new facility, he says, will more than fulfill this wish.

Says Greg Hubbard (B.S. ’72), president of the turf foundation (and superintendent of the Manitou Ridge Golf Course in White Bear Lake), "It’s ideal that the new turf facility is located right on the St. Paul campus. Not only is the proximity for students and faculty terrific, but its location reflects the U’s emphasis on turf and ground management and symbolizes how our industry is a place where the city meets the country."

One of the first COAFES initiatives to receive University funding as a direct result of the priority process is a project called the Nutrient Cycling and Livestock System. Co-directors on the project are two faculty members with long experience in research into water quality and nutrient cycling: David Mulla, a professor in the department of Soil, Water, and Climate and an expert on the environmentally troubled Minnesota River watershed; and Gyles Randall (B.S. ’63, M.S. ’72), a veteran soil scientist and professor who works out of the Southern Outreach and Research Center.

The initiative entails four workshops designed to pinpoint opportunities for research, teaching, and outreach around nutrient cycling by identifying just what we know and don’t know about the fate of nutrients in the environment and promoting a multidisciplinary approach to the topic.

"There are three top nutrient-fate issues in Minnesota," says Randall. "The first involves nitrogen, the main nutrient added to soil to optimize corn and wheat yields. It’s highly mobile, meaning it will move through ground and surface water like the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers and then downstream into the Gulf, where the area affected by hypoxia [lack of oxygen] reached a record size this year." With Minnesota’s widespread row crop and tile drainage systems—the use of drain tiles to divert excess water from fields—a major source of nitrogen runoff, Randall observes, the state now has an environmental impact of global concern.

The second issue involves phosphorus, another widely used ingredient in fertilizer. Unlike nitrogen, phosphorus is relatively immobile. It enters the watershed not through the soil, but by leaching, as a component of runoff or erosion. Phosphorus plays a major role in algae growth in lakes and rivers, a process that soaks up oxygen and plays havoc with fisheries and aquatic plant life.

The third top nutrient cycling issue in Minnesota stems from the state’s rich livestock holdings: Manure is rich in both nitrogen and phosphorus.

"We need to identify the places in each of these nutrient cycles that can be modified in order to keep the nutrients in the soil and out of the water and atmosphere," Randall says.

While the project headed by Mulla and Randall is just getting under way, they both have reason to believe that Minnesota growers are ready to tackle the problem of nutrient cycling.

In his work in the Minnesota River watershed, Mulla has studied all 12 of the major watersheds that feed into the river, and recently began a study of two minor Minnesota River watersheds—there are 1,208 in all—in Nicollet County. What he has found is encouraging.

"[The growers] have been very open to refinements and trying new things," he says. "Farmers are doing a lot of things right in terms of managing the landscape, like injecting manure into the soil rather than relying on surface application. Many are also using good tillage methods, too, and equipment that handles crop residue properly.

"At the same time we are finding ways that farmers can fine-tune their management to make a difference in nutrient cycling, like allowing more credit for the nitrogen content in manure when they estimate how much they can reduce their reliance on chemical fertilizers, and the conversion of surface tiling to buried conduits to reduce the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff."

Still, even though attitudes are changing, Randall observes that, "Change takes time, and progress takes place with changes in mindsets. That comes through research and education and information. And that’s where the U is making a real contribution."

When it was founded more than a century ago, the college of agriculture was an expression of a new idea in the history of thought: the conscious decision to apply scientific research and higher learning to the practical, even homely, pursuit of farming. The effect was to bring continual technological progress and innovation to a field of human endeavor that, since its inception, had largely been governed by tradition and time-honored practices.

We are all aware of the benefits showered on us by this marriage of academia and agriculture—the overwhelming abundance of food produced by American farmers—as well as of the hidden costs of those benefits. The priority process by which the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences recently refined and re-defined itself represents an expansion of, rather than a break with, its original mission. The college is still about applying progress and innovation to practical enterprises, but in the light of what amounts to another new idea: That however diverse the research, teaching, and outreach ventures in which the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences engages, all elements of society and the natural world are inextricably interrelated. You can’t affect one without affecting them all.

Ultimately, it is this interrelatedness that Dean Muscoplat implies when he talks about agriculture "defined as broadly as possible."

"I see our role as a conveyer of knowledge and an open place for debate," he says. "We are about education, not advocacy. We are responsible for fostering sustainability—at all levels. We’re no longer the ‘farm’ campus, we’re the ‘pharm’ campus, because we’re into health. And it isn’t just flour that we’re involved in, but flowers too. And enology, and turf, and food safety, and pollution, and the effects of globalization.

"As a land-grant institution," he continues, "we are above all interested in people, which means communities. And it means being engaged in environmental science at the level of global and societal ecosystems."

Rich Broderick (B.A. ’76) is a St. Paul freelance writer and editor.